Giant Dragon Skull on British Beach Is a Game of Thrones Ad

Fossil hunters gobsmacked

The only thing scarier than a 12-foot-tall Colin Firth in a British lake is a 40-foot-long dragon skull washed up on a British beach. Beachgoers in Dorset were surprised to come across the latter on Monday—as a skull the size of a London bus suddenly appeared on Charmouth beach, part of Dorset's Jurassic coast, famous for its dinosaur fossils.

Alas, it's not a real dragon skull—it's an ad from movie and TV streaming service BlinkBox, which is celebrating the arrival this week of the third season of HBO's epic Game of Thrones on its site. It took a team of three sculptors more than two months to design, construct and paint the skull, which was dreamed up by Taylor Herring, the same PR company that built the giant Mr. Darcy earlier this summer.

The skull—perhaps the coolest Game of Thrones-related marketing since the dragon-shadow newspaper ad—was inspired by the scene in the series when Arya Stark discovers a dragon skull in the dungeons of King's Landing, the capital of the Seven Kingdoms.